Nopps (1979) – Allan Flynn

In like…

I had such a good time putting together the Ralph Rooney card that I’ve wanted to do another for a while. I’ve been working on old League stats recently, and I came across this guy’s impressive career line. For as effective a closer as he is, and for as long as his track record is, he tends to get overlooked in the course of playing the actual games.

The card format is 1979 Topps–this was one of my peak card collecting years. I like the look of the back of these cards, but this year’s feature–baseball dates (I lowercased the “h” in “happened”; I loathe title case)–is lame. I took “dates” in a different direction than Topps did.

For some reason, I always envisioned Allan Flynn having a bit of a Roger Daltrey look. Now that’s canon, for what that’s worth.

I wanted to show a baserunner in the background of this drawing, and I arbitrarily made it a Rapid City Raider. But then my OCD kicked in, and I wanted to see if I could make this a “shot” from an “actual” game. So I pulled the results from the most recent season (1991) and looked to see if there was a game where (1) Rapid City played at Tucson (Flynn is in his home jersey), (2) Flynn pitched, and (3) there was a runner at first. Turns out there was. This runner could have been either Kelly Dreisner or Tony Dussell. If you were wondering, this is Dussell.

Nopps (1978) – Ralph Rooney

Pardon my French, Rooney…

Have wanted to get back to this series for a while.

Here we have Ralph Rooney, a Miami Supersonics player from Eric’s (International) League. This card is based on the Topps 1978 design. Once again, I very much enjoyed the process of matching the fonts, colors, and design of the card back–maybe as much as drawing the player. The only thing I couldn’t solve here was removing the gridlines in the statistics section.

About that drawing… I didn’t have it in me to draw a catcher and umpire, so this “shot” would have to have been taken during an unusually well-attended pregame batting practice. In the original drawing, more of the crowd was shown, including the Hot Pocket crew, late actor Terry-Thomas, and some other… goings on.

The model I used for this drawing was Prince Fielder.

On the Topps 1978 cards, the “Play Ball” feature on the back was a way to play a League-like game: each card had an outcome (strikeout, single, etc), and game results would unfold as you drew cards. Needless to say, the outcome here was NOT featured in the original Topps set.

2021-13, 15, 17 – roof, helmet, collide

The Roof! The Roof! The Roof is…out by a mile.

Meet Brad Roof, veteran first baseman for the Aberdeen Gliders. He’s 32-ish (but an old 32-ish), a pretty good righty hitter, a bad fielder, and slow as molasses. He’s definitely reached the designated-hitter-against-lefties stage of his workmanlike career.

Brad Roof is also lucky that the words “helmet”–and particularly “collide”–were on the 2021 Inktober prompt list, because at the concept stage, this was going to be a picture of him grabbing his helmet in anguish after being called out on strikes. He goes out with a little more dignity here.

When I draw pictures of players from my tabletop baseball league (League), I usually “know” who everyone is. Atypically, I have no thoughts as to who the catcher here is or even where this game is taking place. I don’t think it’s in Aberdeen. The South Dakota one, by the way.

As so many are, this was a drawing that took me forever to sit down to, as I expected it would take a long time. It didn’t. So, yay, a rare Inktober threefer.

I expect this one will eventually show up again in the fledgling Nopps series.

Nopps (1990) – Marty Frammaker

Missing: stale gum

Opening a new untapped vein of cartoons here: baseball cards for the fictitious players that have toiled in a tabletop game I’ve been playing since 1979 with my friend Eric.

Explaining this league (known simply as “League”) would take too long for a single blog entry. Suffice to say, the names of every player come from our fertile and not infrequently demented imaginations. Quite often, there is special “real-world” significance to the name. For example, this guy is a tribute to my mother (“Marty”), who ran a frame shop (“frame maker”). The number of hours Eric and I have lost spent making up names and player back stories…well, it’s probably not a coincidence that neither of us have made our fortunes and retired.

A lot of the fun of making these cards is matching the style of various Topps releases (my preference is for the years Eric and I were collecting baseball cards–this one is the 1977 design), which involves researching/finding fonts and pushing the limits of my image-editing skills.

I also enjoy coming up with twisted versions of the banal factoids that the Topps cards always featured, so this little hobby even scratches the creative writing itch a bit.